The Royal African Society’s African Arguments blog is superb. Being Burundi’s chief inspector of taxation. Why are there riots in Sudan, and what’s likely to happen? Nigerian jihadis attack schools. Rwanda doesn’t like the ICC very much but did recently help it arrest Bosco Ntaganda. Why?
“That something will try to discuss the nuclear dimension of the 1973 War beyond what was discussed before, and it will also be homage to this great blog”: it still sounds a little weird to talk about homage to a great blog, but if you can it would surely be Arms Control Wonk. Avner Cohen sits in to discuss a new source on the Yom Kippur war and the question of how far the Israelis went on nuclear alert. Specifically, his source suggested that they considered letting one off in the desert as a warning shot.
In comments, it turns out that Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears was probably closer to the truth about how they might have delivered the bomb (under a Douglas A-4 Skyhawk) than the assembled scholars.
Clancy, of course, RIP – at his best, his books practically made a virtue of doing without characterisation and letting the technology, tactics, and doctrine drive the plot. It wasn’t as if individual personalities would matter very much to a war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
He also provided a pretty good glass-bottomed boat to watch American conservatism go completely batshit insane – something like Cardinal of the Kremlin recognisably belongs to the era of James Baker, while Debt of Honour and beyond were a preview of the implausible, overblown fanfic thriller we’ve been stuck in since 2001.
As if to roll in its own excellence, Arms Control Wonk then produces a Bayesian analysis of negotiations with Iran and concludes that an Iranian fuel cycle but no isotope program is an acceptable solution that could be verified by international monitoring. Almost disgustingly, they’ve got a detailed proposal for monitoring as well.
China has been testing its new Kuaizhou rocket, a lightweight-class satellite launcher designed for quick turnaround. Rather wonderfully, the name translates as Tea Clipper, or possibly Swift Boat.
The elder brother of the Arellano Felix cartel is murdered by clowns who escape in a speedboat. It has to be Borderland Beat, another great, great blog, and here they cover an unexpected admission from the Americans.
And what is it with Germans and doctorates? This time, we’ve got a fake doctoral adviser and a supervisor who doesn’t remember the student.